John Whittingdale arrives at 10 Downing Street the day after the election to be named in David Cameron ‘s new cabinet.
Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Demotix/Corbis

John Whittingdale’s eclectic tastes mark him out as an unlikely-sounding cabinet minister. The newly appointed secretary of state for culture, media and sport is a devotee of Star Trek and Thunderbirds and a heavy metal fan known to sing karaoke versions of Smoke on the Water and Bat out of Hell.

The Conservative MP is also a horror fan including the so-called “torture porn” of Hostel director Eli Roth. “I quite like really nasty films,” Whittingdale once told journalists. “Hostel is undoubtedly the most unpleasant film I have ever seen,” he said, while Roth’s Netflix series Hemlock Grove “made An American Werewolf in London look like Mary Poppins”.

BBC licence fee in doubt as John Whittingdale is named culture secretary

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His cabinet elevation was entirely unexpected, not least by him, said friends, and fulfilled a long-held ambition. First elected to parliament in 1992, the 55-year-old is hardly in the first flush of his parliamentary career, a one-time Tory rebel who started out as a bag carrier for Margaret Thatcher.

The hearing, in which the fiercest lines of questioning were pursued by his Labour committee colleagues, Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson, brought into focus his relationship with the Murdochs and the News Corp empire, having described Rupert Murdoch (and Kelvin MacKenzie) as the people he most admired in the media.

Whittingdale supported the Sun and Times owner’s aborted bid to take over BSkyB – pre-hacking scandal – was friends with its former executive Les Hinton, dined out with ex-Sun editor Rebekah Brooks and met with Elisabeth Murdoch. “I wouldn’t say they are close friends but you can’t do the job I’ve done [as chair of the committee] without having them as acquaintances,” Whittingdale said in 2011. “It doesn’t suggest close intimacy.”

It is a relationship that is likely to come under renewed scrutiny, but for now it is Whittingdale’s take on the BBC that is garnering attention, with the corporation’s shape and future funding up for grabs along with the renewal of its royal charter by the end of 2016.

There is no shortage of evidence that Whittingdale will take a tough line on the BBC, having said last year that the licence fee was “worse than the poll tax” because there was no element of subsidy for the low-paid.

He is likely to abolish the BBC Trust, replaced by a corporate-style board of directors and chairman alongside director general Tony Hall, and expand its regulation by Ofcom. Plans to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee are firmly on the agenda, which the BBC has said would cost it £200m a year.

But when Whittingdale said the £145.50 licence fee was unsustainable, it was slightly more nuanced than that, adding that he was talking about the long term and certainly beyond the next royal charter.

Unveiling his committee’s report on the future of the BBC earlier this year, Whittingdale compared the funding of the BBC with education and the NHS, paid for by everyone whether or not they use it. “We do think there is a case for public service broadcasting that should be publicly financed,” he said, albeit with some BBC services becoming subscription-based.

“He is not the fire-breathing dragon that many are portraying him,” says Louise Mensch, the former Tory MP who sat on Whittingdale’s select committee. “He will want transparency from the BBC, value for money, and at the very least for it to disclose what they spend their money on. Those who think he will come and slash and burn are quite mistaken; he is not the Terminator.”

Those who think he will come and slash and burn are quite mistaken; he is not the Terminator

Louise Mensch

But Mensch adds: “If I was at the Arts Council I would be looking very hard at my books to make sure we were delivering value for money.”

A former political and private secretary to Margaret Thatcher – dubbed her “toy boy” – Whittingdale was elected to parliament in 1992 in the safe Essex seat previously occupied by John Wakeham.

A childhood ambition to be an astronaut led to a degree in astronomy but he dropped out (“far more theoretical than I had expected”) returning to complete a 2:2 in economics at University College, London. He married in 1990 but is now divorced, with two children in their 20s. His half-brother, Charles Napier, was jailed last year for a string of sexual assaults on boys going back nearly half a century.

The Tories’ unofficial king of pop culture, Whittingdale was once a regular at the Brit awards and claimed to be a subscriber to Heat magazine. A less populist pursuit, he also used to go shooting with executives from Daily Mail owner, Associated Newspapers.

A frequent flier to eastern Europe as chairman of the Ukraine all-party parliamentary group and vice-chair of its Armenian equivalent, he has flown at least five times to Ukraine and three times to Armenia in the last five years. He also visited conferences in Vienna about the future of Ukraine funded by the British Ukrainian Society, of which he was a director, and has links to controversial Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash.

“It’s all about spreading Thatcherism,” suggests one colleague. “If only we could get the free markets to prosper over there, they would all be saved from misery.”

Whittingdale’s new remit extends from media ownership and telecommunications to the creative industries and sport, where there is the challenge of maintaining the 2012 Olympic legacy in the face of funding cuts, and how the Premier League’s latest TV rights deal, likely to top £8.5bn, can be used for the grassroots game. Whittingdale has said he wants an expanded role for the Football Association, likely to put him on collision course with the Premier League.

The budget for the arts has been cut by 36% since 2010 and now faces the prospect of a similar cut as part of the £12bn of departmental savings in the Tory manifesto. Sir Peter Bazalgette, chair of the Arts Council, describes Whittingdale as “extremely diligent, very approachable, thoughtful and occasionally provocative”.

“He is a great consumer of the arts, he knows a lot about computer games and so on, and is intensely knowledgeable about broadcasting,” says Bazalgette. It is not a trait, he says, shared by many culture secretaries over the last 10 or 15 years. “It’s almost without parallel.”

He is a great consumer of the arts, he knows about computer games and is intensely knowledgeable about broadcasting

Peter Bazalgette

On press regulation, Whittingdale’s generally pro-Murdoch sympathies suggest the Leveson reform process set up in the wake of the hacking scandal is effectively over. Warning against legislation to govern the press, he backed the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the successor to the Press Complaints Commission, and was critical of the tactics of lobby group Hacked Off. Elsewhere, Channel 4 could face an uncertain future and possible privatisation.

But it will be the BBC that will most occupy his mind, as it did during his two stints as shadow culture secretary when, in 2003, he said the licence fee should be “at least halved” and the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, sold off.

Whittingdale also commissioned a report from former Channel 5 and Sky executive David Elstein, later disowned by the Tory leadership, that said the licence fee should be replaced by subscription and BBC production privatised. He later said he preferred state funding of the BBC – a “straight government transfer” – to the licence fee and said the corporation had a “certain view of the world” and regarded “anyone who disagreed with it as plainly mad”.

“He is quite an ideological politician presented with a non-ideological face,” says Chris Bryant, Labour MP for Rhondda and new shadow culture secretary. “He’s Thatcher with an Aled Jones complexion. His voting record on everything is pretty hardline Tory.”

According to the site They Work For You, Whittingdale voted against equal gay rights, equal marriage, laws to promote equality and human rights, and the foxhunting ban. He voted in favour of the Iraq war and replacing Trident, and against more EU integration.

“You have to bear in mind what the [coalition government] did in 2010,” says Bryant of the shotgun licence fee settlement which saw the BBC take on new funding responsibilities including the World Service. More top-slicing is likely and there is the possibility that Whittingdale will revisit the idea, which he backed five years ago, of the BBC paying the £500m cost of free TV licences for the over-75s.

If the axeman cometh, then he does so with a cheery smile and a glint in his eye, a man who once said his favourite Star Trek character was The Borg, “an alien species which is very similar to the Whips’ office … a collective consciousness dedicated to the eradication of all other species”.

Whittingdale is amiable company and a fully paid-up member of the human race, a quality that is rare among some MPs. “As Duncan said in Macbeth,” says Bryant. “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

Potted profile

Born 16 October 1959

Age 55

Career Worked for Norman Tebbit and Leon Brittan before being appointed political secretary to Margaret Thatcher in 1988 and personal secretary after her 1990 resignation. 1992 Elected a Tory MP for the first time, in Colchester South and Maldon. 2001 Shadow trade and industry secretary before two stints as shadow culture secretary. 2005 Chairman, culture, media and sport select committee. 2015 Secretary of state for culture, media and sport.

High point Appointment as culture secretary in David Cameron’s new government.

Low point Resigning as a ministerial aide in 1996 after voting against government plans to restrict cross-media ownership.

What he says “I have my tortured moments. But people have always said I’m quite cheerful. I do like people.”

What they say “At the risk of ruining the honourable gentleman’s reputation as Thatcher’s gimp – I mean toy boy – may I enormously commend him for the work he has done as [select] committee chair for the past 10 years” – Chris Bryant MP